Silver Badge Nomination Post 1 Invite 5 INVITE ONLY~Contest
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Not gonna land on that potato field ;-)
Thanks for the Explore nomination and all comments !
Explore N°414
The Jacksonville Public Library is a Carnegie library that opened in 1903. Although Jacksonville's library program began in 1870, it wasn't until shortly after the start of the twentieth century the library had its first permanent home. In 1901, Andrew Carnegie was petitioned for a donation to build a permanent library building. The Carnegie Foundation responded with a $40,000 grant to the City of Jacksonville; one of 105 Carnegie grants in various amounts made to Illinois communities between 1900-1916.
Construction on the library began in 1902 and was completed early the next year. Chicago architects Patton & Miller designed the two-story structure in Classical Revival style using a cross-shaped plan. The building was expanded in the 1990s and continues to house the city's library as the building approaches its 120th anniversary. The Jacksonville Public Library was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
Located in West Central Illinois, thirty-five miles west of the State Capitol in Springfield, Jacksonville is the seat of Morgan County. The population of the city at the 2020 census was 18,267.
Sources:
National Register of Historic Places Inventory - Nomination Form: Morgan County Courthouse
Jacksonville Public Library Registration Form, United States Department of Interior, National Park Service
"Jacksonville Public Library" (Illinois), Wikipedia
Jacksonville, Illinois, Wikipedia
wow thank you so much ..faints and shocked . xx I can't thank you enough for this nomination . I will cherish this forever . I looked at the other nominations and they are truly amazing . Thank you for even considering me Dreamart fashion xxx
Public vote here :
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdwfggCvdRrCqzu5fXMQPe6n...
And when a known logger takes over the forests
They start planning
A branch can cut deeply
A trunk is nature’s largest limb
You can run but you’ll feel and hear a barking
If a tree falls in the middle of the forest,
Friendly leaves will cushion the fall
Grasses caress
Fungi springs and gives rebirth
There’s no such thing as
“If you scream in the middle of the forest and there’s no one there to hear it…”
You never did give them enough credit, did you?
www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2025/02/sierra-club-sta...
**All photos are copyrighted**
The sanctuary on the hill at the Glacier View Ranch, Siskiyou County, CA. Orton Imagery
Stock photo available at: www.blish.com/MyBlish/Selling/CurrentlySelling.aspx
This is the picture that Jury yesterday awarded with the nomination at 2012 B&W Spider Awards.
Portrait Category - Nomination List
Either positive comments than critics are very welcome, not the same for glittering awards, huge icons, invitations etc.
§
TV Week Logie Nominations In Sydney, Australia; News And Lists
Tonight in Sydney, Australia it's the TV Week Logies Nominations.
Karl Stefanovic is battling to snatch back-to-back Gold Logies after nominations for the TV Week industry awards were announced today.
After surprising many media and entertainment commentators including this agency by snatching the major prize last year, the Channel 9 Today co-host got both a Silver and Gold for most popular presenter on Australian TV.
Karl will fight the ABC's Adam Hills, Offspring star Asher Keddie, The Project co-host Carrie Bickmore, ex Home & Away siren Esther Anderson and Nine comedian presenter Hamish Blake for the top honours when the TV Week Logies are awarded on April 15.
Channel 7 leads the network pack, with 32 nominations across 22 categories, followed by Ten (26 nominations), the ABC (22 nominations), Nine (21 nominations), pay TV operator Foxtel (eight nominations) and SBS (seven nominations).
While Packed To The Rafters favourite Rebecca Gibney was overlooked for a Gold Logie nod this year, she is squared off against her TV daughter Jessica Marais for Silver as most popular actress.
Also in the running for Silver was Asher Keddie, acknowledged for her double effort - playing Nina Proudman on Ten's romantic comedy, Offspring, and publishing maverick Ita Buttrose in the ABC1 docu-drama, Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo.
Making their Silver Logie nomination debut are Danielle Cormack (Kate Leigh in Nine's Underbelly Razor) and Esther Anderson (Charlie Buckton on Seven's soap Home & Away).
In the TV fight for the boys, the Silver Logie for most popular actor will be fought between Daniel MacPherson (Wild Boys, Channel 7), Eddie Perfect (Offspring, Ten), Erik Thomson (Packed To The Rafters, Channel 7), Hugh Sheridan (Packed To The Rafters, Channel 7) and Ray Meagher (Home & Away, Channel 7).
Despite turning her back on a TV career for a spot on Melbourne breakfast radio this year, Chrissie Swan secured a nomination as most popular presenter for her role on Ten's morning chat show, The Circle.
The nominations were held at Sydney's Park Hyatt, hosted by Nine's Natalie Gruzlewski and Ten's Bondi Vet, Chris Brown.
FULL LIST OF 2012 LOGIE NOMINATIONS:
TV WEEK GOLD LOGIE AWARD Most Popular TV personality
Adam Hills (Spicks And Specks, ABC1/Adam Hills In Gordon St Tonight, ABC1)
Asher Keddie (Nina Proudman,Offspring, Network Ten /Ita Buttrose, Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, ABC1)
Carrie Bickmore (The Project, Network Ten)
Esther Anderson (Charlie Buckton, Home And Away, Channel Seven)
Hamish Blake (Hamish & Andy's Gap Year, Nine Network)
Karl Stefanovic (Today, Nine Network)
TV WEEK SILVER LOGIE Most Popular Actor
Daniel MacPherson (Jack Keenan, Wild Boys, Channel Seven)
Eddie Perfect (Mick Holland, Offspring, Network Ten)
Erik Thomson (Dave Rafter, Packed To The Rafters, Channel Seven)
Hugh Sheridan (Ben Rafter, Packed To The Rafters, Channel Seven)
Ray Meagher (Alf Stewart, Home And Away, Channel Seven)
TV WEEK SILVER LOGIE Most Popular Actress
Asher Keddie (Nina Proudman, Offspring, Network Ten /Ita Buttrose, Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, ABC1)
Danielle Cormack (Kate Leigh, Underbelly: Razor, Nine Network /Angela Travis, East West 101, SBS)
Esther Anderson (Charlie Buckton, Home And Away, Channel Seven)
Jessica Marais (Rachel Rafter, Packed To The Rafters, Channel Seven)
Rebecca Gibney (Julie Rafter, Packed To The Rafters, Channel Seven)
TV WEEK SILVER LOGIE Most Popular Presenter
Adam Hills (Spicks And Specks,ABC1/Adam Hills In Gordon St Tonight, ABC1)
Carrie Bickmore (The Project, Network Ten)
Chrissie Swan (The Circle, Network Ten)
Hamish Blake (Hamish & Andy's Gap Year, Nine Network)
Karl Stefanovic (Today, Nine Network)
MOST POPULAR NEW MALE TALENT
Dan Ewing (Heath Braxton, Home And Away, Channel Seven)
James Mason (Chris Pappas, Neighbours, Network Ten)
Peter Kuruvita (Host, My Sri Lanka With Peter Kuruvita, SBS)
Steve Peacocke (Darryl "Brax" Braxton, Home And Away, Channel Seven)
Tom Wren (Dr Doug Graham, Winners & Losers, Channel Seven)
MOST POPULAR NEW FEMALE TALENT
Anna McGahan (Nellie Cameron, Underbelly: Razor, Nine Network)
Chelsie Preston Crayford (Tilly Devine, Underbelly: Razor, Nine Network)
Demi Harman (Sasha Bezmel, Home And Away, Channel Seven)
Melissa Bergland (Jenny Gross, Winners & Losers Channel Seven)
Tiffiny Hall (Trainer, The Biggest Loser Australia, Network Ten)
MOST POPULAR DRAMA SERIES
Home And Away (Channel Seven)
Offspring (Network Ten)
Packed To The Rafters (Channel Seven)
Underbelly: Razor (Nine Network)
Winners And Losers (Channel Seven)
MOST POPULAR LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM
Australia's Got Talent (Channel Seven)
Hamish & Andy's Gap Year (Nine Network)
Spicks And Specks (ABC1)
Sunrise (Channel Seven)
The Project (Network Ten)
MOST POPULAR LIFESTYLE PROGRAM
Better Homes And Gardens (Channel Seven)
Getaway (Nine Network)
iFISH (Network Ten)
Ready Steady Cook (Network Ten)
Selling Houses Australia Extreme (LifeStyle Channel, FOXTEL
MOST POPULAR SPORTS PROGRAM
2011 AFL Grand Final (Network Ten)
Before The Game (Network Ten)
The AFL Footy Show (Nine Network)
The NRL Footy Show (Nine Network)
Wide World Of Sports (Nine Network)
MOST POPULAR REALITY PROGRAM
Beauty And The Geek Australia (Channel Seven)
MasterChef Australia (Network Ten)
My Kitchen Rules (Channel Seven)
The Block (Nine Network)
The X Factor Australia (Channel Seven)
MOST POPULAR FACTUAL PROGRAM
Bondi Rescue (Network Ten)
Bondi Vet (Network Ten)
Border Security: Australia's Front Line (Channel Seven)
RPA (Nine Network)
World's Strictest Parents (Channel Seven)
MOST OUTSTANDING NOMINEES (peer voted by industry)
TV WEEK SILVER LOGIE Most Outstanding Drama Series, Miniseries or Telemovie
Cloudstreet (Showcase, FOXTEL)
Offspring (Network Ten)
Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo (ABC1)
The Slap (ABC1)
Underbelly: Razor (Nine Network)
TV WEEK SILVER LOGIE Most Outstanding Actor
Alex Dimitriades (The Slap, ABC1)
David Wenham (Killing Time, TV1, FOXTEL)
Don Hany (East West 101, SBS)
Geoff Morrell (Cloudstreet, Showcase, FOXTEL)
Rob Carlton (Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, ABC1)
TV WEEK SILVER LOGIE Most Outstanding Actress
Asher Keddie (Paper Giants: The Birth Of Cleo, ABC1)
Diana Glenn (Killing Time, TV1, FOXTEL)
Essie Davis (The Slap, ABC1)
Kat Stewart (Offspring, Network Ten)
Melissa George (The Slap, ABC1)
GRAHAM KENNEDY AWARD FOR MOST OUTSTANDING NEW TALENT
Anna McGahan (Underbelly: Razor, Nine Network)
Chelsie Preston Crayford (Underbelly: Razor, Nine Network)
Hamish Macdonald (Senior Foreign Correspondent, Network Ten)
Hamish Michael (Crownies, ABC1)
Melissa Bergland (Winners & Losers, Channel Seven)
MOST OUTSTANDING NEWS COVERAGE
Lockyer Valley Flood (Brisbane News, Channel Seven)
Qantas Grounded (Sky News National, Sky News Australia, FOXTEL)
Skype Scandal (Ten News At Five, Network Ten)
The Queensland Flood (Nine News, Nine Network)
Unfinished Business (SBS World News Australia, SBS)
MOST OUTSTANDING PUBLIC AFFAIRS REPORT
A Bloody Business (Four Corners/Sarah Ferguson, ABC1)
After The Deluge: The Valley (Paul Lockyer, ABC1)
Rescue 500 (Sunday Night, Channel Seven)
Salma In The Square (Foreign Correspondent/Mark Corcoran, ABC1)
Tour Of Duty: Australia's Secret War (Network Ten)
MOST OUTSTANDING LIGHT ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM
Australia's Got Talent (Channel Seven)
Gruen Planet (ABC1)
Spicks And Specks (ABC1)
Talkin Bout Your Generation (Network Ten)
The Project (Network Ten)
MOST OUTSTANDING SPORTS COVERAGE
2011 Australian Open Tennis (Channel Seven)
2011 Bathurst 1000 (Channel Seven)
2011 Melbourne Cup Carnival (Channel Seven)
State Of Origin III (Nine Network)
Tour de France 2011 (SBS)
MOST OUTSTANDING CHILDRENS PROGRAM
Camp Orange: Wrong Town, (Nickelodeon, FOXTEL)
Lockie Leonard (Nine Network)
My Place (ABC3)
Saturday Disney (Channel Seven)
Scope (Network Ten)
MOST OUTSTANDING FACTUAL PROGRAM
Go Back To Where You Came From (SBS)
Leaky Boat (ABC1)
Mrs Carey's Concert (ABC1)
Outback Fight Club (SBS)
Tony Robinson Explores Australia (The History Channel, (FOXTEL)
The TV Week Logie Awards ceremony will take place at Crown Melbourne on Sunday 15th April.
Good luck to all.
Websites
TV Week Logies
www.tvweek.ninemsn.com.au/logies
TV Week
Park Hyatt, Sydney
Crown Melbourne
Eva Rinaldi Photography Flickr
www.flickr.com/evarinaldiphotography
Eva Rinaldi Photography
The Lantern Group
Music News Australia
2018 SAFAS AWARDS - Final Voting
The SL Academy of Fashion Arts and Sciences [SAFAS]©®
A Second Life professional honorary organization with open membership. Organization and staff positions are extended by our Board of Governors to distinguished contributors to the arts and sciences of SL fashion. A yearly awards program recognizes those who have advanced the fashion world of SL through their contributions.
After receiving thousands of individual nominations that span hundreds of categories, we have created this final form for you to vote for your favorites in the respective categories. The form below is provided for you to vote for who you feel has contributed to the world of SL and who should be recognized.
The final results of our winners will be announced LIVE at the 2018 SAFAS Awards in Second Life on Saturday, June 30, 2018.
Thank you for your vote and feel free to join our in-world group (free) in Second Life
[SL Academy of Fashion Arts&Science].
Please help us by voting for your favorites in each category. Voting from the TOP nominations will end on June 29, 2018 and the final results of our winners will be announced LIVE at the 2018 SAFAS Awards in Second Life on Saturday, June 30, 2018.
Who would you like to nominate for a 2018 SAFAS Awards?
Do you want to vote for me? Thank you !!!!
FINAL VOTING HERE: docs.google.com/forms/d/13k_t_VNPPz5X31dCIpJIaljqZ1f5iYJ_...
Blog LuceMia
My Flickr
www.flickr.com/photos/lucemia/
My FB
I have been in avi heaven and thanking everyone for this unforgettable nomination; and I know I have been up against and proudly next to “the best”!
Strawberry Singh has been a silent mentor to me throughout my career as a Second Life Blogger and I humbly extend my Congratulations to her for winning in 2 Categories: Favorite Fashion Blog and Favorite Fashion Blogger! As I scour through her posts for information and updates, I am always amazed this Teacher has so much time to dedicate herself to publish astonishing material, photographs and tutorials!
I have received my Avi Choice Nominee Award Trophy and will proudly keep it rez’d at the entrance of my shops forever!
Although I was unable to attend the Avi Choice Fashion Award Event this past Saturday, I did make it to pick up the gifts and play around a bit within the gorgeous theatre and surrounding rooms!
And guess what?
The Paparazzi was still there waiting for me……
∻⊰҉♡҉⊱∻
This is one of those builds where I just had this idea, and then just sat there giggling to myself all the while building it. :D I even reused some of my previous Mario-themed builds in this, so it was just a fun quick little build.
Brought this to Brickworld back in June (only got around to uploading it now... woopsie), where it got a nomination for Best Humour! :)
The Badshahi Mosque (Urdu: بادشاھی مسجد) or the 'King's Mosque' in Lahore, commissioned by the sixth Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1671 and completed in 1673, is the second largest mosque in Pakistan and South Asia and the fifth largest mosque in the world. Epitomising the beauty, passion and grandeur of the Mughal era, it is Lahore's most famous landmark and a major tourist attraction.
Capable of accommodating 5,000 worshippers in its main prayer hall and a further 95,000 in its courtyard and porticoes, it remained the largest mosque in the world from 1673 to 1986 (a period of 313 years), when overtaken in size by the completion of the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad. Today, it remains the second largest mosque in Pakistan and South Asia and the fifth largest mosque in the world after the Masjid al-Haram (Grand Mosque) of Mecca, the Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (Prophet's Mosque) in Medina, the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca and the Faisal Mosque in Islamabad.
To appreciate its large size, the four minarets of the Badshahi Mosque are 13.9 ft (4.2 m) taller than those of the Taj Mahal and the main platform of the Taj Mahal can fit inside the 278,784 sq ft (25,899.9 m2) courtyard of the Badshahi Mosque, which is the largest mosque courtyard in the world.
In 1993, the Government of Pakistan recommended the inclusion of the Badshahi Mosque as a World Heritage Site in UNESCO's World Heritage List, where it has been included in Pakistan's Tentative List for possible nomination to the World Heritage List by UNESCO
An Oscar nomination animated short film titled paperman really struck me. I have been in kind of a rut, and have been struggling to produce ideas; not much inspiration. I came across this film a couple days ago and it instantly made me press replay. From the subtle realistic gestures, to the score by Christophe Beck, it really took me back in my chair with my hands on my head. Inspiration was instantly conveyed to the right side of my brain and will reside. Thank you Disney.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rog8ou-ZepE
Ice bucket challenge nominated by cold frog and Lisa Outsider.
My next nomination is Chaos. Lucifer and Miles Cantelou
Yes, I was going to be taking a little break from flickr but I've had a couple of pieces of lovely news over the last half a week. As you can probably guess from the above, I've been nominated for an award on the Hipstography website, for a portfolio of mine they published earlier last year. Some of you may remember that. Really chuffed to be included, especially amongst some really wonderful fellow photographers. Well, apparently once the nominations were chosen it is then a public vote. So, y'all should duck over there, take a gander at the fantastic nominations and vote for your faves! You can find the right page here .
Also, although many of you will have noticed, I was super pleased to get an honourable mention in the Mobile Photography Awards street category that was announced late last week, for this photo . Anyhoo, big thanks to all of you for your continued encouragement and company, I've learnt so much from keeping company with you all on this place. Appreciate it everyone!
NB: Although I did not win this category, the same shot of bathers at Bondi won the Hipstography monochrome photo of the year. Yay.
British postcard, no. PC0479. River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991).
American actor River Phoenix (1970-1993) was noted for the depth, sensitivity, and intelligence that he brought to his roles during his teens. He began his acting career at age 10 in television commercials and had his first notable role in the coming-of-age film Stand by Me (1986). Phoenix made a transition into more adult-oriented roles with Running on Empty (1988), which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and My Own Private Idaho (1991), for which he won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival. He was on the cusp of becoming a major star when he overdosed on drugs and died on Halloween night, 1993. At the time of his death, he was filming Dark Blood, which was released incomplete 19 years later, in 2012.
River Phoenix was born River Jude Bottom in 1970, in a log cabin on a mint farm in Madras, Oregan. He was the first child of Arlyn Dunetz and John Bottom. His parents named him after the "river of life" that flowed through Hermann Hesse's novel 'Siddhartha' and for the Beatles' song 'Hey Jude'. From the time Phoenix was born, his parents lived the hippie life, moving to several communes until they joined the controversial Children of God cult. They became missionaries for their new church and spent a couple of years wandering Latin America before landing in Venezuela. Phoenix never attended formal school. Along the way, three more children were born: Rain, Joaquin Rafael (who grew up to be actor Joaquin Phoenix), and Libertad Mariposa. Though John Bottom had been designated the "Archbishop of Venezuela and the Caribbean," he and his family received no missionary funds from their church and lived in poverty. Phoenix and his siblings often sang and performed on street corners for food. His family hit their lowest point when Phoenix was seven and the penniless brood was forced to move into a beach hut until a local priest showed mercy and arranged for them to be stowed away on a Florida-bound freighter. The crew discovered the family during the voyage but treated them kindly. Shortly after their arrival in Florida in 1978, the family legally changed its name to Phoenix, after the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes, symbolising a new beginning. While the family was in Florida, another child, Summer Joy Phoenix, was born. River Phoenix had originally wanted to be a musician and did not become interested in acting until 1979 when he and Rain were spotted in a talent show and invited to audition at Hollywood's Paramount Studios. Believing that the opportunity was worth more than the possible risks involved, the Phoenix family headed West in a battered station wagon. Their arrival in Burbank was disappointing, as the Paramount people reneged on what the family had believed to be an offer to audition the children. Once again the family was destitute and the children returned to busking for change. Matters improved when agent Iris Burton spotted the four children singing for spare change in Westwood, Los Angeles, and was so charmed by the family that she soon represented the four siblings. She started finding work for Phoenix in television commercials and in series such as Real Kids (1980), for which he and Rain worked as a warm-up act. Phoenix's first real break came when he won a leading role in the TV series Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982) with Richard Dean Anderson. From there, he made guest appearances on such television series as Family Ties and in such TV movies as Robert Kennedy: The Man and His Times (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1985) in which he played Robert Kennedy Jr., and Brad Davis his father.
River Phoenix made his feature-film debut as geeky boy-scientist Wolfgang Müller in the Science-Fiction Fantasy Explorers (Joe Dante, 1985). The film, which also starred a debuting Ethan Hawke, was not a tremendous box-office success, but Phoenix received favourable notices. He earned even more acclaim in the bittersweet coming-of-age story Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986), based on the novella 'The Body' by Stephen King. The same year, he played opposite Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast (Peter Weir, 1986). By the late 1980s, Phoenix found himself a top-ranked teen idol, having added films like Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988), Little Nikita (Richard Benhamin, 1988) with Sidney Poitier, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989) to his resumé. Harrison Ford personally recommended him for the part of the young Indy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) after working with him on The Mosquito Coast (1986). For his part in Running on Empty, he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe and received the Best Supporting Actor honor from the National Board of Review. Phoenix met Keanu Reeves while Reeves was filming Parenthood (Ron Howard, 1989) with Phoenix's brother, Joaquin. Phoenix had reportedly auditioned for Bill in Reeves' Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989) before the role was taken by Alex Winter. The two starred together for the first time in I Love You to Death (Lawrence Kasdan, 1990). His breakthrough as an adult actor came when he was cast as a narcoleptic street hustler opposite Reeves in My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991). In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen praised Phoenix's performance: "The campfire scene in which Mike awkwardly declares his unrequited love for Scott is a marvel of delicacy. In this and every scene, Phoenix immerses himself so deeply inside his character you almost forget you've seen him before: it's a stunningly sensitive performance, poignant and comic at once". For his role, Phoenix won Best Actor honors at the Venice Film Festival, the National Society of Film Critics, and the Independent Spirit Awards. The film and its success solidified Phoenix's image as an actor with edgy, leading man potential. Allegedly, it was during the production of that film that Phoenix started taking drugs. Before his death, he won further acclaim for roles in the romantic coming-of-age drama Dogfight (Nancy Savoca, 1991) and the espionage thriller Sneakers (Phil Alden Robinson, 1992) with Robert Redford and again with Sidney Poitier.
River Phoenix was a dedicated animal-rights activist and environmentalist, and a strict vegetarian, and a member of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). He was also a talented musician. He had played guitar, sang, and wrote songs for his band, Aleka's Attic, which also included his sister Rain Phoenix, while living in Gainsville, Florida. He sang and played guitar in the country music-themed film The Thing Called Love (Peter Bogdanovich, 1993), the last completed picture before his death. On the set, Phoenix began a relationship with co-star Samantha Mathis. In late October 1993, Phoenix returned to Los Angeles, only there for 1 day, after flying back from 1 week in New Mexico and before that 6 to 7 weeks in Utah to complete the three weeks of interior shots left on his last project, the American-Dutch thriller Dark Blood (George Sluizer, 1993-2012), with Judy Davis and Jonathan Pryce. On the evening of 30 October 1993, Phoenix was to perform with the band P; which featured his good friends Johnny Depp, Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers along with Al Jourgensen of Ministry at The Viper Room, a Hollywood nightclub partly owned at the time by Depp. Later that night Phoenix died of drug-induced heart failure on the boardwalk outside of the Viper Room in the company of Mathis, his sister, Rain, and his brother Joaquin. He was only 23. Joaquin Phoenix and his partner Rooney Mara later named their son, River, after him. After 19 years, River's last film, Dark Blood, was finally completed in 2012. For the 2012 release, roughly four to six missing scenes were replaced with director George Sluizer providing narration. It was revealed in October 2011 that Sluizer had held onto the footage, fearing it would be destroyed, and that he had re-edited the material and believed that with some adjustments a completed film could be released. In 1999 the insurance company that owned the negatives wanted to stop paying storage costs, so they considered having the film destroyed. Sluizer entered the storage area that held the negative and removed it. Geoffrey Macnab from The Guardian: "Dark Blood is fragmentary, uneven and downright odd in parts but it also has huge curiosity value. The director's solution for bridging the considerable gaps is to read out descriptions of what is missing. It's a simple but surprisingly effective tactic. His narration ensures that the film is just about coherent. (...) Phoenix brings a wild physical energy to his role – in truth, his character verges on the preposterous but Phoenix tackles it with such commitment that he just about keeps absurdity at bay."
Sources: Sandra Brennan (AllMovie), Geoffrey Macnab (The Guardian), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Hello friends, Versus got a nomination for the Avi Choice Awards in the category "FAVORITE MAGAZINE, NEWSPAPER OR PERIODICAL" . We wanna ask for if you kindly could follow this link and vote for us
avichoiceawards.com/vote-here-the-arts/
Thank you for your support!
Pompeo congratulates Nechirvan Barzani on KRG presidential nomination
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo congratulated Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani on his nomination for the KRG presidency, according to a State Department readout published Wednesday night.
During a surprise visit to Erbil on Wednesday evening, Pompeo congratulated PM Barzani on his nomination for the presidency – a post which has been frozen since Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) president Masoud Barzani resigned in 2017 following the Kurdistan independence referendum.
According to a readout from the US State Department, Pompeo also emphasized “strong US support for continued dialogue between the KRG and the central government in Baghdad.”
Following an unscheduled stop in the Iraqi capital Baghdad on Wednesday morning, Pompeo travelled on to Erbil, where he also met with Masoud Barzani and Kurdistan Region Security Council Chancellor Masrour Barzani – who has been nominated for the office of prime minister.
If approved, the two Barzani cousins will hold both the top seats of government. They will only be successful if the KDP gets its way in government formation talks with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Change Movement (Gorran) – their nearest rivals.
PM Barzani described his meeting with Pompeo as “productive”.
They “discussed the recent territorial defeat of ISIS in Syria” while underscoring “the value of our strategic relationship with Iraq and our longstanding friendship with the IKR [Iraqi Kurdistan Region], which is vital for ensuring mutual security and regional stability.”
Pompeo is touring several Middle Eastern states to drum up support for America’s anti-Iran campaign and to reassure allies in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s bombshell decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria
O'Halloran, Thomas J.,, photographer.
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm announcing her candidacy for presidential nomination
1/25/72 [25 January 1972]
1 photograph : safety negative ; film width 35mm (roll format)
Notes:
Title from contact sheet folder caption.
Forms part of: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).
Subjects:
Chisholm, Shirley,--1924-2005--Political activity.
Presidential elections--1970-1980.
Legislators--New York (State)--1970-1980.
Format: Film negatives--1970-1980.
Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication.
Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Part Of: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) (DLC) 92517073
Higher resolution image is available (Persistent URL): hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.55937
Call Number: LC-U9-25383- 31
**Missouri State Capitol Historic District** - National Register of Historic Places Ref # 76001109, date listed 6/18/1976
Bounded roughly by Adams, McCarthy, Mulberry Sts. and the Missouri River
Jefferson City, MO (Cole County)
Jefferson City was organized around the Capitol complex. The topography is a series of river bluffs and rolling hills. The bluff promontories were selected as sites for the Capitol Building and the Governor's Mansion to lend prominence to these important structures. The town was oriented parallel to the Missouri River which at this point flows from northwest to southeast.
The district contains more than 100 structures of various ages, designs, and functions. It represents a consolidation of five existing entries on the National Register of Historic Places and the incorporation of adjacent commercial, religious, and governmental structures and grounds to form a historic district at the heart of Missouri's seat of government.
Carnegie Public Library. 210 Adams Street, 1901. A good example of turn of-the-century architecture, this stone structure was designed by Frank B. Miller. Threatened with demolition to make way for a parking lot, it is one of the few surviving Carnegie library buildings in Missouri. (pg 5) (1)
References (1) NRHP Nomination Form catalog.archives.gov/id/63818680
American postcard by Classico San Francisco, no. 105-017. Photo: 20th Century Fox. Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956).
By 1953, Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars, with leading roles in three films: the Noir Niagara, which focused on her sex appeal, and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire, which established her star image as a "dumb blonde". Although she played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, she was disappointed at being typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was briefly suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project, but returned to star in one of the biggest box office successes of her career, The Seven Year Itch (1955).
Marilyn Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926 in Lemmon, South Dakota. She was the third child of Gladys Pearl Baker née Monroe, who suffered from mental illness and later worked as a film cutter at RKO. Marilyn was abandoned by her mother and she spent most of her childhood in foster homes and an orphanage. Just after her 16th birthday, she married 21-year-old aircraft plant worker James 'Jim' Dougherty. In 1943, Dougherty enlisted in the Merchant Marine. He was initially stationed on Catalina Island, where she lived with him until he was shipped out to the Pacific in April 1944; he would remain there for most of the next two years. While working in a factory as part of the war effort in 1944, Marilyn met photographer David Conover and began a successful modelling career. She began to occasionally use the name Jean Norman when working and had her curly brunette hair straightened and dyed blond to make her more employable. As her figure was deemed more suitable for pin-up than fashion modelling, she was employed mostly for advertisements and men's magazines. By early 1946, she had appeared on 33 magazine covers for publications such as Pageant, U.S. Camera, Laff, and Peek. She divorced Dougherty in 1946. The work led to a screen test by 20th Century Fox executive and former film star Ben Lyon. Head executive Darryl F. Zanuck was unenthusiastic about it, but he was persuaded to give her a standard six-month contract to avoid her being signed by rival studio RKO Pictures. Monroe began her contract in August 1946, and together with Lyon selected the screen name, Marilyn Monroe. Among her first film parts were nine lines of dialogue as a waitress in the drama Dangerous Years (Arthur Pierson, 1947) and a one-line appearance in the comedy Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (F. Hugh Herbert, 1948). After a series of other minor film roles, she moved to Columbia. While at Fox her role had been that of a 'girl next door', at Columbia she was modelled after Rita Hayworth. Monroe's hairline was raised by electrolysis and her hair was bleached even lighter, to platinum blond. She also began working with the studio's head drama coach, Natasha Lytess, who would remain her mentor until 1955. Her only film at the studio was the low-budget musical Ladies of the Chorus (Phil Karlson, 1948), in which she had her first starring role as a chorus girl who is courted by a wealthy man. After leaving Columbia in September 1948, Monroe became a protégée of Johnny Hyde, vice president of the William Morris Agency. Hyde began representing her and their relationship soon became sexual, although she refused his proposals of marriage. To advance Monroe's career, he paid for a silicone prosthesis to be implanted in her jaw and arranged a bit part in the Marx Brothers' film Love Happy (David Miller, 1949). That year, she also made minor appearances in two critically acclaimed films: John Huston's crime film The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Joseph Mankiewicz's drama All About Eve (1950). Following Monroe's success in these roles, Hyde negotiated a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox in December 1950. Over the next two years, she became a popular actress with roles in several comedies, including As Young as You Feel (Harmon Jones, 1951) and Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952) with Cary Grant, and in the dramas Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952) and Don't Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952) with Richard Widmark. Her popularity with audiences was growing: she received several thousand letters of fan mail a week. The second year of the Fox contract saw Monroe become a top-billed actress, with gossip columnist Florabel Muir naming her the year's 'it girl' and Hedda Hopper describing her as the 'cheesecake queen' turned 'box office smash'. She began a highly publicized romance with retired New York Yankee baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, one of the most famous sports personalities of the era. A month later, Monroe faced a scandal when it was revealed that she had posed for nude photos before becoming a star, but rather than damaging her career, the story increased interest in her films.
By 1953, Marilyn Monroe was one of the most marketable Hollywood stars with leading roles in three hits: the Film Noir Niagara and the comedies Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. In Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953), she played a femme fatale scheming to murder her husband, played by Joseph Cotten. While Niagara made Monroe a sex symbol, the satirical musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953), established her screen persona as a 'dumb blonde'. Based on Anita Loos' bestselling novel and its Broadway version, the film focuses on two 'gold-digging' showgirls, Lorelei Lee and Dorothy Shaw, played by Monroe and Jane Russell. It became one of the biggest box office successes of the year by grossing $5.3 million, more than double its production costs. Her next film, How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953), co-starred Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall. It featured Monroe in the role of a naïve model who teams up with her friends to find rich husbands, repeating the successful formula of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Despite mixed reviews, the film was Monroe's biggest box office success so far, earning $8 million in world rentals. Although she played a significant role in the creation and management of her public image throughout her career, she was disappointed at being typecast and underpaid by the studio. She was suspended in early 1954 for refusing a film project. The suspension was front-page news and Monroe immediately began a publicity campaign to counter any negative press and to strengthen her position in the conflict. On 14 January, she and Joe DiMaggio were married at the San Francisco City Hall. They then travelled to Japan, combining a honeymoon with his business trip. From there, she travelled alone to Korea, where she performed songs from her films as part of a USO show for over 60,000 U.S. Marines over a four-day period. She settled with Fox and returned to star in one of the biggest box office successes of her career, The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955). Then followed the release of Otto Preminger's Western River of No Return (1955), in which Monroe appeared opposite Robert Mitchum. When the studio was still reluctant to change her contract, Monroe and photographer Milton Greene founded a film production company in late 1954, Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP). She dedicated 1955 to building her company and began studying method acting at the Actors Studio. She grew close to the studio's director, Lee Strasberg and to his wife Paula, receiving private lessons at their home due to her shyness, and she soon became like a family member. In late 1955, Fox awarded her a new contract, which gave her more control and a larger salary. Monroe did a critically acclaimed performance in Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956). She played Chérie, a saloon singer whose dreams of stardom are complicated by a naïve cowboy who falls in love with her. She received a Golden Globe for Best Actress nomination for her performance. Then she acted opposite Laurence Olivier in the first independent production of MMP, The Prince and the Showgirl (Laurence Olivier, 1957), made in Great Britain. It was released in June 1957 to mixed reviews and proved unpopular with American audiences. The film was better received in Europe where it won Crystal Star awards and was nominated for a BAFTA.
Then Marilyn Monroe acted opposite Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in the classic comedy Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959). The film was an absolute smash hit, with Curtis and Lemmon pretending to be females in an all-girl band, so they can get work. This was to be Marilyn's only film for the year. She won a Golden Globe for Best Actress for her role. Monroe took a hiatus until late 1959, when she returned to Hollywood to star in the musical comedy Let's Make Love (George Cukor, 1960), about an actress and a millionaire (Yves Montand) who fall in love when performing in a satirical play. Her affair with Montand was widely reported by the press and used in the film's publicity campaign. Her last completed film was the drama The Misfits (John Huston, 1961), which Arthur Miller had written to provide her with a dramatic role. She played a recently divorced woman who becomes friends with three ageing cowboys, played by Clark Gable, Eli Wallach, and Montgomery Clift. Monroe returned to the public eye in the spring of 1962: she received a 'World Film Favorite' Golden Globe award and began to shoot a new film for 20th Century-Fox, Something's Got to Give, a re-make of My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940). Days before filming began, Monroe caught sinusitis; despite medical advice to postpone the production, Fox began it as planned in late April. Monroe was too ill to work for the majority of the next six weeks, but despite confirmations by multiple doctors, the studio tried to put pressure on her by alleging publicly that she was faking it. On 19 May 1962, she took a break to sing Happy Birthday on stage at President John F. Kennedy's birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in New York. She drew attention with her costume: a beige, skintight dress covered in rhinestones, which made her appear nude. Monroe next filmed a scene for Something's Got to Give in which she swam naked in a swimming pool. To generate advance publicity, the press was invited to take photographs of the scene, which were later published in Life. It was the first time that a major star had posed nude while at the height of their career. When she was again on sick leave for several days, Fox decided that it could not afford to have another film running behind schedule when it was already struggling to cover the rising costs of Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963). The studio blamed Monroe for the film's demise and began spreading negative publicity about her, even alleging that she was mentally disturbed. Fox soon regretted its decision, and re-opened negotiations with Monroe later in June; a settlement about a new contract, including re-commencing Something's Got to Give and a starring role in the black comedy What a Way to Go! (J. Lee Thompson, 1964), was reached later that summer. To repair her public image, Monroe engaged in several publicity ventures, including interviews for Life and Cosmopolitan and her first photoshoot for Vogue. For Vogue, she and photographer Bert Stern collaborated on two series of photographs, one a standard fashion editorial and another of her posing nude, which were both later published posthumously with the title The Last Sitting. In the last weeks of her life, she was also planning on starring in a biopic of Jean Harlow. Only 36, Marilyn Monroe died on 5 August 1962 from an overdose of barbiturates. She was discovered dead at her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. She had a phone in one of her hands, and her body was completely nude and face down, on her bed. During her life and also after her death, her troubled private life received much attention. She struggled with addiction, depression, and anxiety. She had two highly publicized marriages, to baseball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, which both ended in divorce. Although the death was ruled a probable suicide, several conspiracy theories have been proposed in the decades following her death. There are over 600 books written about her.
Sources: De Nieuwe Kerk, Marilyn Geek, IMDb and Wikipedia.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
© Ben Heine || Facebook || Twitter || www.benheine.com
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This is a traditional watercolor painting I made
a long time before Barack Obama got elected
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For more information about my art: info@benheine.com
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Obama is the change that America has tried to hide
Only one candidate offers the radical departure for the 21st century the US needs, for its own sake and the rest of the world's
By Alice Walker
I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.
When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger. That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town. I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed. To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote. I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend," and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man." One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our country's contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word "Womanism" many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say: Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time, whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done; more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us: We are the ones we have been waiting for.
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This article appeared on www.guardian.co.uk/
Vintage postcard, no. 136.
Greta Scacchi (1960) is an Italian-Australian actress best known for her roles in the films White Mischief (1987), Presumed Innocent (1990), The Player (1992), and Emma (1996). Scacchi received a BAFTA nomination for her role in Heat and Dust (1983). For her portrayal of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia in the television film, Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny (1996), she won a Primetime Emmy Award and earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 2006, Scacchi received a second Emmy nomination for her role in the TV film Broken Trail.
Greta Scacchi was born in 1960 in Milan, Italy. Her parents were Luca Scacchi, an Italian art dealer and painter, and Pamela Risbey, an English dancer and antiques dealer. Scacchi's parents divorced when she was four, and her mother returned to her native England with Greta and her two older brothers, first to London, then to Haywards Heath, West Sussex. In 1975, after her mother's remarriage the family moved to Perth, Australia, where her stepfather was a visiting professor at the University of Western Australia (UWA). While in Perth, Scacchi attended Hollywood Senior High School. After she left school, Greta worked as an Italian interpreter on a ranch. She joined UWA's University Dramatic Society, where she made her theatrical debut at the New Dolphin Theatre in Edward Bond's play Early Morning under director Arne Neeme. In 1977, 18-years-old Scacchi returned to England to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where her contemporaries included Miranda Richardson and Amanda Redman. She paid her way through college by working as a model for catalogues.She played small parts as a stage actress before she made her first screen appearance in an episode of the British detective series Bergerac (1981), starriong John Nettles. Scacchi made her film debut in Germany in Das Zweite Gesicht/The Second Face (Dominik Graf, 1982). She learned German for this production. Scacchi is also fluent in English, French, and Italian, which has made her a popular choice for European casting directors. In the following years, she gave versatile performances in such productions as Heat and Dust (James Ivory, 1983) starring Julie Christie, the TV film The Ebony Tower (Robert Knights, 1984) opposite Laurence Olivier, and the Australian comedy The Coca-Cola Kid (Dusan Makavejev, 1985) featuring Eric Roberts. She also appeared in in French, Italian and English films for such directors as the Taviani Brothers, Margareta Von Trotta and Diana Kurys.
Greta Scacchi turned down Hollywood for many years but after her success in White Mischief (Michael Radford, 1987) with Sarah Miles and Charles Dance, she agreed to co-star with Harrison Ford in the thriller Presumed Innocent (Alan J. Pakula, 1990). After that followed Shattered (Wolfgang Petersen, 1991) with Tom Berenger and Bob Hoskins, Fires Within (Gillian Armstrong, 1991), and The Player (Robert Altman, 1992) with Tom Robbins. She returned to Europe to appear in such films as The Browning Version (Mike Figgis, 1994) with Albert Finney, and Emma (Douglas McGrath, 1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow. In 1996, Scacchi won an Emmy Award for her work as Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna of Russia in the television film, Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny (Uli Edel, 1996) with Alan Rickman, and was nominated for a Golden Globe and numerous other awards. In 1999, she had a role as an Italian-Australian single mother in the Australian film Looking for Alibrandi (Kate Woods, 1999), a performance for which she won the 2000 AFI award for Best Supporting Actress. In 2007, she received an Emmy Award nomination for the TV mini-series Broken Trail (Walter Hill, 2006) with Robert Duvall. Scacchi has also performed in a wide range of parts in theatre. In 1987, she appeared at the West End in Uncle Vanya, opposite Michael Gambon and Jonathan Pryce. In 1991 she played Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House in the Festival of Perth. A year later she played in Sydney the lead role in Strindberg's Miss Julie. In 2001 she returned to Sydney for Harold Pinter's Old Times, directed by Aarne Neeme, playing Kate. In 2004 she toured Italy with the Italian version of the play, Vecchi Tempi, but this time playing Anne. In 2008, she was nominated for a Sydney Theatre Best Actress Award for playing Queen Elizabeth in Schiller's Mary Stuart in Sydney. In that year she also performed in Greta Britain in Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea. In 2010, she replaced an injured Kristin Scott Thomas in the French premiere (37 years after it was written) of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. In May 2011, she appeared alongside Anita Dobson in the play Bette and Joan at London's Arts Theatre, directed by Bill Alexander, about the personal and professional relationship between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.In 2013, she played Regan in William Shakespeare's King Lear at The Old Vic in London. In 2016 she played Phoebe Rice opposite Kenneth Branagh's Archie Rice in a revival of John Osborne's The Entertainer in the West End. Scacchi was in a relationship with New Zealand musician Tim Finn from 1983–1989. Later, she had a relationship with American actor Vincent D'Onofrio, with whom she has a daughter, Leila George (born in 1992). Scacchi is an Italian citizen by birth. She applied for British citizenship after turning 18 but was refused and refused again on appeal. She is a dual citizen of Italy and Australia. Scacchi is married to her first cousin, Carlo Mantegazza, after taking advice and getting permission from senior members of the Catholic church. The marriage took place in a private ceremony on the banks of Lake Como in 1997. They have a son, Matteo, born in 1998. For her services to the arts she was made a knight in the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2013. Greta Scacchi continues to appear in supporting parts on screen, including roles in TV series like The Terror (2018) with Hared Harris, Italian thrillers like La ragazza nella nebbia/The Girl in the Fog (Donato Carrisi, 2017) with Toni Servillo, Hollywood movies like Operation Finale (Chris Weitz, 2018), and Australian films like Palm Beach (Rachel Ward, 2019).
Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
American postcard by Fotofolio, New York, N.Y., no. PH 18, 1981. Photo: Philippe Halsman, 1962 / Hastings Galleries Collection. Alfred Hitchcock at the set of The Birds (1963).
British director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) was known as 'The Master of Suspense'. He is one of the most influential and extensively studied filmmakers in the history of cinema. He had his first major success with The Lodger (1926), a silent thriller loosely based on Jack the Ripper. Hitchcock came to international attention with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), and, most notably, The Lady Vanishes (1938). His first Hollywood film was the multi-Oscar-winning psychological thriller Rebecca (1940). Many classics followed including Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963). In a career spanning six decades, he directed over 50 feature films which garnered a total of 46 Oscar nominations and 6 wins.
Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born in Leytonstone, on the outskirts of east London, in 1899. He was the son of Emma Jane Whelan and East End greengrocer William Hitchcock. His parents were both of half English and half Irish ancestry. He had two older siblings, William and Eileen Hitchcock. Raised as a strict Catholic and attending Saint Ignatius College, a school run by Jesuits, Hitch had very much of a regular upbringing. In 1914, his father died. To support himself and his mother—his older siblings had left home by then—Hitchcock took a job in 1915 as an estimator for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. His interest in films began at around this time, frequently visiting the cinema and reading US trade journals. In a trade paper, he read that Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm of Paramount Pictures, was opening a studio in London. They were planning to film The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli, so Hitch produced some drawings for the title cards and sent his work to the studio. They hired him, and in 1919 he began working for Islington Studios as a title-card designer. Hitchcock soon gained experience as a co-writer, art director, and production manager on at least 18 silent films. After Hugh Croise, the director for Always Tell Your Wife (1923) fell ill, Hitchcock and star and producer Seymour Hicks finished the film together. When Paramount pulled out of London in 1922, Hitchcock was hired as an assistant director by a new firm run in the same location by Michael Balcon, later known as Gainsborough Pictures. He began to collaborate with the editor and "script girl" Alma Reville, his future wife. He worked as an assistant to director Graham Cutts on several films, including The Blackguard (1924), which was produced at the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam. There Hitchcock watched part of the making of F. W. Murnau's film Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924). He was impressed with Murnau's work and later used many of his techniques for the set design in his own productions. In the summer of 1925, Balcon asked Hitchcock to direct The Pleasure Garden (1925), starring Virginia Valli, a co-production of Gainsborough and the German firm Emelka. Reville, by then Hitchcock's fiancée, was assistant director-editor. In 1927, Hitchcock made his first trademark film, the thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) starring Ivor Novello. The Lodger is about the hunt for a serial killer who, wearing a black cloak and carrying a black bag, is murdering young blonde women in London, and only on Tuesdays. The Lodger was a commercial and critical success in the UK. In the same year, Hitchcock married Alma Reville. They had one child, Patricia Hitchcock (1928). Reville became her husband's closest collaborator and wrote or co-wrote on many of his films. Hitchcock made the transition to sound film with his tenth film, Blackmail (1929), the first British 'talkie'. Blackmail began the Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for suspense sequences, with the climax taking place on the dome of the British Museum. He used early sound recording as a special element of the film, stressing the word "knife" in a conversation with the woman (Anny Ondra) suspected of murder. It was followed by Murder! (1930). In 1933 Hitchcock was once again working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British on The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934). It was a success. His second, The 39 Steps (1935), with Robert Donat, made him a star in the USA. It also established the quintessential English 'Hitchcock blonde' (Madeleine Carroll) as the template for his succession of ice-cold, elegant leading ladies. His next major success was The Lady Vanishes (1938), with Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave. The film saw Hitchcock receive the 1938 New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director.[
David O. Selznick signed Hitchcock to a seven-year contract beginning in March 1939, and the Hitchcocks moved to Hollywood. He directed an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1940), starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier. Rebecca won the Oscar for Best Picture, although Hitchcock himself was only nominated as Best Director. Hitchcock's second American film was the thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), set in Europe, and produced by Walter Wanger. It was nominated for Best Picture that year Suspicion (1941) was the first of four projects on which Cary Grant worked with Hitchcock, and it is one of the rare occasions that Grant was cast in a sinister role. In one scene Hitchcock placed a light inside a glass of milk, perhaps poisoned, that Grant is bringing to his wife, played by Joan Fontaine. The light makes sure that the audience's attention is on the glass. Fontaine won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance. Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was Hitchcock's personal favourite. Charlotte "Charlie" Newton (Teresa Wright) suspects her beloved uncle Charlie Oakley (Joseph Cotten) of being a serial killer. Hitchcock was again nominated for the Oscar for Best Director for Lifeboat (1944) and Spellbound (1945), but he never won the award. Spellbound (1945), starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, explores psychoanalysis and features a dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. Notorious (1946) stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, both Hitchcock regulars, and features a plot about Nazis, uranium, and South America. After a brief lull of commercial success in the late 1940s, Hitchcock returned to form with Strangers on a Train (1951), based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith. In the film, two men casually meet, one of whom speculates on a foolproof method to murder. He suggests that two people, each wishing to do away with someone, should each perform the other's murder. Farley Granger played the innocent victim of the scheme, while boy-next-door" Robert Walker played the villain. I Confess (1953) was set in Quebec with Montgomery Clift as a Catholic priest. It was followed by three colour films starring Grace Kelly: the 3-D film Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch a Thief (1955). From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host of the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. With his droll delivery, gallows humour and iconic image, the series made Hitchcock a celebrity. in his films, Hitchcock often used the "mistaken identity" theme, such as in The Wrong Man (1956), and North by Northwest (1959). In Vertigo (1958), James Stewart plays Scottie, a former police investigator suffering from acrophobia. He develops an obsession with a woman he has been hired to shadow (Kim Novak). His obsession leads to tragedy, and this time Hitchcock does not opt for a happy ending. Vertigo is one of his most personal and revealing films, dealing with the Pygmalion-like obsessions of a man who crafts a woman into the woman he desires. Psycho (1960) was Hitchcock's great shock masterpiece, mostly for its haunting performances by Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins and its shower scene, and The Birds (1963) became the unintended forerunner to an onslaught of films about nature-gone-mad, and booth films were phenomenally popular. Film companies began to refer to his films as 'Alfred Hitchcock's': Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), and Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976). During the making of Frenzy (1972), Hitchcock's wife Alma suffered a paralysing stroke which made her unable to walk very well. In 1979, Hitchcock was knighted, making him Sir Alfred Hitchcock. A year later, in 1980, he died peacefully in his sleep due to renal failure. Hitchcock was survived by his wife and daughter. After the funeral, his body was cremated. His remains were scattered over the Pacific Ocean.
Sources: Bruce Eder (AllMovie), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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Italian postcard by Rotalfoto, Milano, no. N. 41.
American actress Natalie Wood (1938-1981) was one of Hollywood's most valuable and wanted actresses in the early 1960s. At 4, she started out as a child actress and at 16, she became a star, when she co-starred with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). For this role, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. In 1961, she played Maria in the hit musical West Side Story. She was nominated twice for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, for Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Love with the Proper Stranger (1963). Only 43, Wood drowned during a boating trip with husband Robert Wagner and Brainstorm (1983) co-star Christopher Walken.
Natalie Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko in San Francisco, USA, in 1938. Her parents were Russian immigrants. Her father Nikolai Stepanovich Zakharenko was a day laborer and carpenter and her mother Maria Zudilova was a housewife. Wood's parents had to migrate due to the Russian Civil War (1917-1923). Maria had unfulfilled ambitions of becoming an actress or ballet dancer. She wanted her daughters to pursue an acting career, and live out her dream. Maria frequently took a young Wood with her to the cinema, where Maria could study the films of Hollywood child stars. The impoverished family could not afford any other acting training to Wood. The Zakharenko family eventually moved to Santa Rosa, where young Wood was noticed by members of a crew during a film shoot. The family moved to Los Angeles to help seek out roles for her. RKO Radio Pictures' executives William Goetz and David Lewis chose the stage name "Natalie Wood for her. The first name was based on her childhood nickname Natalia, and the last name was in reference to director Sam Wood. Natalia's younger sister Svetlana Gurdin (1946) would eventually follow an acting career as well, under the stage name Lana Wood. Natalie made her film debut in the drama Happy Land (Irving Pichel, 1943) starring Don Ameche, set in the home front of World War II. She was only 5-years-old, and her scene as the 'Little Girl Who Drops Ice Cream Cone' lasted 15 seconds. Wood somehow attracted the interest of film director Irving Pichel who remained in contact with her family over the next few years. Wood had few job offers over the following two years, but Pichel helped her get a screen test for a more substantial role opposite Orson Welles as Wood's guardian and Claudette Colbert in the romance film Tomorrow Is Forever (Irving Pichel, 1946). Wood passed through an audition and won the role of Margaret Ludwig, a post-World War II German orphan. At the time, Wood was "unable to cry on cue" for a key scene. So her mother tore a butterfly to pieces in front of her, giving her a reason to cry for the scene. Wood started appearing regularly in films following this role and soon received a contract with the film studio 20th Century Fox. Her first major role was that of Susan Walker in the Christmas film Miracle on 34th Street (George Seaton, 1947), starring Edmund Gwenn and Maureen O'Hara. The film was a commercial and critical hit and Wood was counted among the top child stars in Hollywood. She received many more to play in films. She typically appeared in family films, cast as the daughter or sister of such protagonists as Fred MacMurray, Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis. Wood appeared in over twenty films as a child actress. The California laws of the era required that until reaching adulthood, child actors had to spend at least three hours per day in the classroom, Wood received her primary education on the studio lots, receiving three hours of school lessons whenever she was working on a film. After school hours ended, Wood would hurry to the set to film her scenes.
Natalie Wood gained her first major television role in the short-lived sitcom The Pride of the Family (1953-1954). At the age of 16, she found more success with the role of Judy in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) opposite James Dean and Sal Mineo. She played the role of a teenage girl who dresses up in racy clothes to attract the attention of a father (William Hopper) who typically ignores her. The film's success helped Wood make the transition from child star to ingenue. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, but the award was instead won by Jo Van Fleet. Her next significant film was the Western The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), playing the role of abduction victim Debbie Edwards, niece of the protagonist Ethan Edwards (John Wayne). The film was a commercial and critical hit and has since been regarded as a masterpiece. Also in 1956, Wood graduated from Van Nuys High School, with her graduation serving as the end of her school years. She signed a contract with Warner Brothers, where she was kept busy with several new films. To her disappointment, she was typically cast as the girlfriend of the protagonist and received roles of little depth. For a while, the studio had her paired up with teenage heartthrob Tab Hunter as a duo. The studio was hoping that the pairing would serve as a box-office draw, but this did not work out. One of Wood's only serious roles from this period is the role of the eponymous protagonist in the melodrama Marjorie Morningstar (Irving Rapper, 1958) with Gene Kelly, playing a young Jewish girl whose efforts to create her own identity and career path clash with the expectations of her family. Wikipedia: "The central conflict in the film revolves around the traditional models of social behavior and religious behavior expected by New York Jewish families in the 1950s, and Marjorie's desire to follow an unconventional path." The film was a critical success, and fit well with other films exploring the restlessness of youth in the 1950s. Wood's first major box office flop was the biographical film All the Fine Young Cannibals (Michael Anderson, 1960), examining the rags to riches story of jazz musician Chet Baker (played by Robert Wagner) without actually using his name. The film's box office earnings barely covered the production costs, and film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer recorded a loss of 1,108,000 dollars. For the first time. Wood's appeal to the audience was in doubt.
With her career in decline following this failure, Natalie Wood was seen as "washed up" by many in the film community. But director Elia Kazan gave her the chance to audition for the role of the sexually-repressed Wilma Dean Loomis in Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961) with Warren Beatty. The film was a critical success and Wood for first nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The award was instead won by rival actress Sophia Loren. Wood's next important film was West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961), where she played Maria, a restless Puerto Rican girl. Wood was once again called to represent the restlessness of youth in a film, this time in a story involving youth gangs and juvenile delinquents. The film was a great commercial success with about 44 million dollars in gross, the highest-grossing film of 1961. It was also critically acclaimed and is still regarded among the best films of Wood's career. However, Wood was disappointed that her singing voice was not used in the film. She was dubbed by Marni Nixon, who also dubbed Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), and Deborah Kerr in The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956). Wood's next leading role was as burlesque entertainer and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee in the Biopic Gypsy (Mervyn LeRoy, 1962) alongside Rosalind Russell. Some film historians credit the part as an even better role for Wood than that of Maria, with witty dialogue, a greater emotional range, and complex characterisation. The film was the highest-grossing film of 1962 and well-received critically. Wood's next significant role was that of Macy's salesclerk Angie Rossini in the comedy-drama Love with the Proper Stranger (Robert Mulligan, 1963). In the film, Angie has a one-night-stand with musician Rocky Papasano (Steve McQueen), finds herself pregnant, and desperately seeks an abortion. The film underperformed at the box office but was critically well-received. The 25-year-old Wood received her second nomination for the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, but it was won by Patricia Neal. Wood continued her successful film career and made two comedies with Tony Curtis: Sex and the Single Girl (Richard Quine, 1964) and The Great Race (Blake Edwards, 1965), the latter with Jack Lemmon, and Peter Falk. For Inside Daisy Clover (Sydney Pollack, 1965) and This Property Is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966), both of which co-starred Robert Redford, Wood received Golden Globe nominations for Best Actress. However, her health status was not as successful. She was suffering emotionally and had sought professional therapy. She paid Warner Bros. 175,000 dollars to cancel her contract and was able to retire for a while. She also fired her entire support team: agents, managers, publicist, accountant, and attorneys. She took a three-year hiatus from acting.
Natalie Wood made her comeback in the comedy-drama Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (Paul Mazursky, 1969), with the themes of sexual liberation and wife swapping. It was a box office hit. Wood decided to gamble her 750,000 dollars fee on a percentage of the gross, earning a million dollars over the course of three years. Wood was pregnant with her first child, Natasha Gregson (1970). She chose to go into semi-retirement to raise the child, appearing in only four more theatrical films before her death. These films were the mystery-comedy Peeper (Peter Hyams, 1975) starring Michael Caine, the Science-Fiction film Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979) with Sean Connery, the sex comedy The Last Married Couple in America (Gilbert Cates, 1980) with George Segal and Valerie Harper, and the posthumously-released Science-Fiction film Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983). In the late 1970s, Wood found success in television roles. Laurence Olivier asked her to co-star with him in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Robert Moore, 1976). After that, she appeared in several television films and the mini-series From Here to Eternity (Buzz Kulik, 1979), with William Devane and Kim Basinger. For From Here to Eternity, she received a Golden Globe Award and high ratings. She had plans to make her theatrical debut in a 1982 production of 'Anastasia'. On 28 November 1981, during a holiday break from the production of Brainstorm (1983), Natalie Wood joined her husband Robert Wagner, their friend Christopher Walken, and captain Dennis Davern on a weekend boat trip to Catalina Island. The four of them were on board Wagner's yacht Splendour. On the morning of 29 November 1981, Wood's corpse was recovered 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) away from the boat. The autopsy revealed that she had drowned. Wikipedia: "The events surrounding her death have been the subject of conflicting witness statements, prompting the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, under the instruction of the coroner's office, to list her cause of death as 'drowning and other undetermined factors' in 2012. In 2018, Wagner was named as a person of interest in the ongoing investigation into Wood's death." Natalie Wood was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. Her would-be comeback film Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983) was incomplete at the time of her death. It was ultimately finished and released, but Wood's character had to be written out of three scenes while a stand-in and changing camera angles were used for crucial shots. Natalie Wood was married three times. Her second husband was the British film producer and screenwriter Richard Gregson (1969-1972). She was twice married to actor Robert Wagner, from 1957 till 1962 and from 1972 till her death in 1981. She had two daughters, Natasha Gregson Wagner (1970) with Richard Gregson, and Courtney Wagner (1974) with Robert Wagner. The 2004 TV film The Mystery of Natalie Wood chronicles Wood's life and career. It was partly based on the biographies 'Natasha: the Biography of Natalie Wood' by Suzanne Finstad and 'Natalie & R.J.' by Warren G. Harris. Justine Waddell portrays Wood.
Sources: Dimos I (IMDb), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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Sarah Jane Hyland (born November 24, 1990) is an American actress. Born in New York City, Hyland attended the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, followed by small roles in the films Private Parts (1997), Annie (1999), and Blind Date (2007). She gained her first major role as Haley Dunphy on the ABC sitcom Modern Family, for which she has received critical acclaim and numerous accolades and nominations, sharing four Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series with her cast members and garnering a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
De Hallen Amsterdam, McDonalds (Rotterdam), Tennisclub IJburg, Small church Klein Wetsinge (Winsum), Swimming pool Het Noorderparkbad (Amsterdam), Plus Ultra (Wageningen Campus), het KWR Watercycle Research Institute (Nieuwegein) and the underground parking garage Katwijk aan Zee are nominated for the best Dutch building of 2016.
American postcard by Fotofolio, no. P430. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.
American actress Julia Roberts (1967) won more than 30 other acting awards including an Academy Award for her leading role in Erin Brockovich (2000) plus Oscar nominations for Steel Magnolias (1989), Pretty Woman (1990) and August: Osage County (2013). Her films have grossed more than $3.9 billion globally, making her one of the most bankable film stars of all time.
Julia Fiona Roberts was born in Smyrna, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, in 1967. Julia is the youngest of three children of Walter Grady Roberts and Betty Lou Bredemus, one-time actors and playwrights. Her parents were close friends with Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. Walter and Betty Lou Roberts ran the Actors and Writers Workshop, then the only integrated drama school in Atlanta, which the Kings' eldest daughter Yolanda King attended. The Kings paid the hospital bill for Julia's birth. When Roberts was four years old., her parents divorced. Her brother Eric stayed with his father and Julia and her sister Lisa continued to live with their mother in Atlanta. When Roberts was nine, her father died of cancer. As a child, due to her love of animals, Julia originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but later studied journalism. Her parents were in the drama club, so acting was soon in the cards. Her brother Eric was originally seen as the great acting promise of the family but ended up producing more quantity than quality in the eyes of critics. Sister Lisa is not actually a professional actress but has since appeared in twenty-four films in small supporting roles, mostly in titles by her younger sister. While at school, Roberts worked as a waitress in a pizzeria and spent some time behind the cash register in a supermarket. When Eric achieved some success in Hollywood, Julia decided to try acting. She started taking acting classes and went to live with her sister in New York where she signed with the Click Modeling Agency. She took speech lessons to get rid of her southern accent. She made her film debut with a bit role in Blood Red (Peter Masterson, 1989), starring her brother Eric Roberts, which was completed in 1986 but wouldn't be released until 1989. She appeared in several television features and series, including Miami Vice (1988). Her first break came in 1988 when she appeared in two youth-oriented films Mystic Pizza (Donald Petrie, 1988) and Satisfaction (Joan Freeman, 1988). It helped her earn the credentials she needed to land the part of Shelby, an ill-fated would-be mother in the comedy-drama Steel Magnolias (Herbert Ross, 1989). The tearjerker found her acting alongside Sally Field and Shirley MacLaine which culminated in an Oscar nomination for Roberts. Then followed the supernatural thriller Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990) with her flame Kiefer Sutherland.
Julia Robert's biggest success was in the romantic comedy Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990) with Richard Gere. Originally intended to be a dark cautionary tale about class and prostitution in Los Angeles, the film was re-conceived as a romantic comedy with a large budget. Critic Roger Ebert: "Roberts does an interesting thing; she gives her character an irrepressibly bouncy sense of humor and then lets her spend the movie trying to repress it. Actresses who can do that and look great can have whatever they want in Hollywood." Julia got an Oscar nomination and also won the People's Choice award for Favorite Actress. It was widely successful at the box office and was the third-highest-grossing film of 1990. Julia's part as a good-hearted Hollywood prostitute who falls in love with a millionaire client was her definitive breakthrough role. Her role opposite Denzel Washington in the John Grisham adaptation The Pelican Brief (Alan J. Pakula, 1993), reaffirmed her status as a dramatic actress. Even though Julia would spend the next few years either starring in serious films or playing fantasy roles like Tinkerbell in Steven Spielberg's Hook (1991), filmgoers would always love Julia best in romantic comedies such as Notting Hill (Richard Curtis, 1999) with Hugh Grant, and Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999) with Richard Gere. In My Best Friend's Wedding (P.J. Hogan, 1997), she starred opposite Dermot Mulroney, Cameron Diaz and Rupert Everett, as a food critic who realizes she's in love with her best friend and tries to win him back after he decides to marry someone else. The cult comedy gave the genre some fresh life that had been lacking in Hollywood for some time. Roger Ebert: "One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass' screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this. It makes the Julia Roberts character sympathetic at first, but eventually her behavior shades into cruel meddling. Stories like this are tricky for the actors. They have to be light enough for the comedy, and then subtle in revealing the deeper tones. Roberts, Diaz and Mulroney are in good synch, and Roberts does a skillful job of negotiating the plot's twists: We have to care for her even after we stop sharing her goals. "
Julia Roberts' had her biggest success when she delivered an Oscar-winning performance playing the title role in Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000). The film, based on the true story of Erin Brockovich, a single mother who, against all odds, won a heated battle against corporate environmental offenders, earned Roberts a staggering 20-million-dollar salary. The next year, Roberts starred in the crime caper Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001), in which she acted with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and George Clooney. A success with critics and at the box office alike, Ocean's Eleven became the fifth highest-grossing film of the year with a total of $450 million worldwide. In 2004, Roberts signed on for the sequel, the aptly titled Ocean's Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004). In 2006, she made her Broadway debut alongside Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper in the revival of Richard Greenberg's play 'Three Days of Rain', but the production was not a success. Roberts teamed with Tom Hanks for Charlie Wilson's War (Mike Nichols, 2007), and then again for Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011). In between, she gave a critically acclaimed performance in Eat, Pray, Love (Ryan Murphy, 2010), in which she portrayed a divorcee on a journey of self-discovery. In 2012, she played Snow White's evil stepmother in Mirror, Mirror (Tarsem Singh, 2012). Roberts starred alongside Meryl Streep and Ewan McGregor in the black comedy drama August: Osage County (John Wells, 2013) about a dysfunctional family that reunites in the familial house when their patriarch suddenly disappears. Her performance earned her her fourth Academy Award nomination. Julia Roberts was in a relationship with actor Kiefer Sutherland for a while. In 1991, their relationship ended five days before they got married. She married country singer Lyle Lovett in 1993 but divorced him in 1995. She met her second husband, cameraman Danny Moder while shooting the film the road gangster comedy The Mexican (Gore Verbinski, 2000) with Brad Pitt. Roberts and Moder married in 2002 in Taos, New Mexico. Together they had twins in 2004, a daughter, Hazel Patricia, and a son, Phinnaeus 'Finn' Walter. In 2007, Roberts gave birth to their third child, Henry Daniel. All the children were given their father's surname. Julia Roberts also became involved with UNICEF charities and has made visits to many different countries, including Haiti and India, in order to promote goodwill. On-screen, she appeared in Jodie Foster's thriller Money Monster (2016), the coming-of-age drama Wonder (Steven Chbosky, 2017), and the romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise (Ol Parker, 2022) with George Clooney. She received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for the television adaptation of Larry Kramer's AIDS-era play The Normal Heart (Larry Murphy, 2014), had her first regular television role in the first season of the psychological thriller series Homecoming (2018), and portrayed Martha Mitchell opposite Sean in the political thriller series Gaslit (2022) about the Watergate Scandal.
Sources: Roger Ebert (Roger Ebert.com), Tracie Cooper (AllMovie), KD Haisch (IMDb), Wikipedia (Dutch and English) and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.
Nomination for Drisyam 2008 exhibition, Ernakulam Town Hall (26th - 30th December) Taken on Alleppey beach.
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